Kitchen 41(1)

I have named my kitchen. I was creating a new recipe today because I needed to get rid of the extra black-eyed peas from New Year’s Day. I ate as much luck* as I could, but I still had leftovers.

Cooking is one of my joys and if I had realized in high school how much money successful chefs make, I probably would have gone to culinary school instead of earning degrees in Radio/Television Production, Secondary Education (really English but I was missing a Spanish class), and Counselor Education {more another time on what ideal career I could have with those degrees!}. I learned to cook from my mother and grandmother and most of what they cooked was without recipe. They cooked by appearance and taste and both mastered it.

Since I love to cook and cook for friends. I was thinking about these things as I stood at the counter inventing black-eyed pea pie. Since friends eat here, the place needed a name. I wanted something chic, something trendy, something personal.

And so I arrived at Kitchen 41.

Kitchen – that’s where the table is.

41 – that’s the last two digits of the zip code where the kitchen is.

Kitchen41: come by and eat sometime.


*black-eyed peas are more than a contemporary music group; they are a traditional Southern good luck food since the times of the Civil War. The story goes that due to the war many crops were not tended and black-eyed peas were the only plentiful food. If you’ve ever raised black-eyed peas, they grow like weeds, so I can believe it.